Justin Hendrix, at Medium, Bike lanes and World War II The Facebook Manifesto in a Time of Crisis:
The average American consumer spends nearly an hour on Facebook and its platforms every day. 79% of American adults use Facebook. Most folks in media consider this through the lens of media habits- engagement with Facebook and other social platforms has, of course, eaten in to consumption of other forms of media.We rightly worry about the spread of fake news and filter bubbles. But as some scholars have noted, Facebook does something even more insidious. It replaces the public sphere with a space that seems public- like the neighborhood parent group. José Marichal chronicles this phenomenon in his excellent Facebook Democracy: The Architecture of Disclosure and the Threat to Public Life:… technology challenges our conventional understandings of public and private, by creating mediated publics that have characteristics of publicness but are not quite public in that they are filtered, be it through shared interest in a subject or by kinship or some other factor.
Hendrix goes on to quote from Zuckerberg's recent manifesto (which I have not read) where Zuckerberg asserts "Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location." He's skeptical:
Sounds great. Yet there is something deeply troubling about it all. Put aside the effects we are witnessing at the local level- the disagreement in a neighborhood group, and extrapolate to the broader global picture. This is a moment of profound danger all across the world, as democracies stumble and nationalists rise. Polarization is a major problem. Inequality seems intractable. The US State Department reports that freedom of expression and freedom of association are on the decline worldwide. Serious people worry we are on the verge of World War III.
I think his skepticism is warranted.
YES! It is threatening human thriving.
ReplyDeleteOf course this depends very much what you consider an online community. Communities like Brainstorms I think greatly enrich the lives of the participants without separating them from society. I am not so sure about Facebook and other parts of what we refer to as social media.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Jim. Of course FB & Twitter & Instagram etc. are all business interested in maximizing views so they can maximize $$$income. BS & other places are quite different. In my own case as an independent scholar with heterodox ideas, the web in general has given me an intellectual life that would have been impossible otherwise, even if I had an academic post. At a minimum I can make my stuff available. I don't have any one place online that I can say is an intellectual community, not even here (because there just isn't much interaction here, alas), but here and there I do have conversations and opportunities. It's a complex ecosystem and you have to figure out how to work it. But there definitely new opportunities and affordances.
DeleteThis is a very small and select group to which you refer. the majority of people seem to be more and more numbed to other peoples' tragedy eg. online videoes of suicide and rape on facebook.
DeleteA reader has passed along a link to a 2009 article in the Australian Humanities Review by Meaghan Morris. At that time Morris was Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. It's a thoughtful article. Here's a paragraph:
ReplyDelete‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact' is a grizzle in this sense. What on earth is supposed to follow from a declaration like that? If parents are being incited to pull the plug on their children, or to seize their mobile phones, will millions of adults also rush off-line to chat in a neighbouring office or across the back fence? What would happen in the ‘real world' of our working lives if we did so? Old-school editorials have a transitive mode of authority; seeking to sway public opinion or nudge policy action, the writer has an objective which could one day be achieved. When an upscale paper like the SCMP—read by educated, over-employed, middle to upper class expats and locals working 15-hour days and more in a city that runs on financial services and transport logistics—makes a wildly inoperative call for its readers to abandon on-line socializing for more ‘face time', a curiously sub-cultural mode of address conflicts with the mode of authority. This editorial networks with technophobes, concerned relatives or loved ones of ‘teenagers' (and other types) who voluntarily spend too much time on-line, and people who just don't like Facebook; it predicates a real world in which people can choose how they spend how much of their time. Yet overwhelmingly in Hong Kong, as in many cities today, middle class people have borderless working lives and we spend most of our time, wherever we are, with computers. Facebook for me is real world contact. It's not the only kind I have but (pace Riley) it matters. In a day consumed by memos, reference-writing, refereeing tasks, managerial compliance chores and a never-ending stream of email, Facebook is my bit of heaven, a haven of warmth, silly fun and friendliness I can enter in an instant from my screen; contact there is real because it is diverse and unpredictable (unlike much of my work). To argue that another site is better for this purpose could make good critical sense, and to propose a legally enforceable maximum 40 hour week for ‘knowledge workers' would be even better. However, to urge me to spend more time off-line (‘making new friends and maintaining old friendships') for the sheer good of my soul is a grizzle from those fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Lonely author.
ReplyDelete